Description
Book SynopsisThis pioneering collection of nine original essays carves out a new conceptual path in the field by theorizing the ways in which the language of games and warfare inform and illuminate each other in the early modern cultural imagination. They consider how warfare and games are mapped onto each other in aesthetically and ideologically significant ways in the early modern plays, poetry or prose of William Shakespeare, Thomas Morton, John Milton, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, and Jonathan Swift, among others. Contributors interpret the terms 'war games' or 'games of war' broadly, freeing them to uncover the more complex and abstract interplay of war and games in the early modern mind, taking readers from the cockpits and clowns of Shakespearean drama, through the intriguing manuals of cryptographers and the ingenious literary wargames of Restoration women authors, to the witty but rancorous paper wars of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements
The Interplay of Games and War in Early Modern English Literature: An Introduction
Jim Daems and Holly Faith Nelson
'Can this cock-pit hold the vasty fields of France?' Cockfighting and the Representation of War in Shakespeare's Henry V
Louise Fang
Game Over: Play and War in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida
Sean Lawrence
Thomas Morton's Maypole: Revels, War Games, and Trans-Atlantic Conflict
Jim Daems
Milton's Epic Games: War and Recreation in Paradise Lost
David Currell
Ciphers and Gaming for Pleasure and War
Katherine Ellison
Virtual Reality, Roleplay, and World Building in Margaret Cavendish's Literary War Games
Holly Faith Nelson and Sharon Alker
Dice, Jesting, and the 'Pleasing Delusion' of War-Like Love in Aphra Behn's The Luckey Chance
Karol Cooper
War and Games in Swift's The Battle of the Books and Gulliver's Travels.
Lori A. Davis Perry
Time-Servers, Turncoats, and the Hostile Reprint: Considering the Conflict of a Paper War
Jeffrey Galbraith
Notes on Contributors
Index
